Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Jim Martin, a friend for 66 years, died on 10/21, at home in Kalua-Kona HI, with his wife of 43 years, Deb (Deborah) Hayes, and his brother Ross Martin to see him off as he succumbed finally to kidney disease. Jim — James Littell Martin III, but he was Jim to everyone, always — was 84 (born 8/7/1940, just one month before me, 9/6/1940, so on August 7th he regularly twitted me wryly on being my senior). The eldest of the five children of James L. Martin Jr. and his wife Helene, of Tulsa OK, Jim was one of my roommates at Princeton — we were in the class of 1962 — where he graduated with a major in biology. And went on to jobs in California, Texas, and Colorado before retiring to Hawaii.

I’ll provide further standard information about Jim’s life in a little while. But first some words from Deb and from me about his character and nature, as explanation for why we so lament his death.

The qualities of the man. From mail to close friends from Deb right after Jim died (quoted here with her permission), on Jim’s qualities:

brilliant, sweet, accepting, shy, thoughtful, awkward, loving, handsome, funny, quiet

I added, in e-mail to her:

he was happy to give you his wry and pointed observations about things around him, but never said a word about his accomplishments. Jim was perhaps the least self-aggrandizing person I have ever known.

Jim’s mantra at Princeton was “eat a little, sleep a little, watch a little tube” — but you don’t get a Princeton degree in biology (as Jim did) by eating, sleeping, and watching tv. Jim was in fact brilliant, but self-effacing to a fault (genuinely humble, as Deb put it to me). Very occasionally, he would intercede in some discussion by saying, levelly and quietly, “I’m just an Okie, but…” — as if he were a random roustabout off the oil derrick (when his father, who he essentially never mentioned, was a high-powered petroleum geologist, a fact I just learned two days ago, in searching through source materials) — and going on to cut to the core of the matter.

His role our senior year was as the laid-back guy leavening two strong characters: the intensely dramatic Frank (Franklyn J. Carr, long-dead now), almost always on stage; and the intellectually driven Arnold, noisily juggling linguistics and mathematics.

When I visited with him in Los Angeles (I was there to give a talk at UCLA), he was working as an assistant, a grunt, in a medical research lab at UCLA; he had me come to the lab (rather than meeting in Westwood, or elsewhere in LA), not because he wanted to show off the things he did, but because he was excited about the lab’s work and the cool equipment and wanted me to see them first-hand.  Though eventually he went on to get a PhD in physiology from the Baylor College of Medicine (in 1976) — a fact I learned, eventually, from our Princeton class and not from Jim.

More facts. I’ll start with the Princeton Alumni Weekly obit for James L. Martin Jr. ’37:

Geologist, stamp collector, and rose grower, Jim Martin died June 15, 1999, leaving his wife of 59 years, Helene, children James III ’62, Ross, John, Anne, and Julia, and two grandchildren. [AZ commentary: the Jim of this death notice was the oldest child. Anne, the youngest (who I met in Los Angeles), was 15 years younger than him. Julia died in 2014; the other three survive.]

At Andover, Jim was on the soccer and track teams. At Princeton, he majored in geology, won the James A. Church Scholarship, and graduated with high honors. He was on the soccer team, manager of lacrosse, and a member of Campus Club, as was his son [AZ: and Frank Carr, and me]. He continued his geology studies at Louisiana State U., earning an MS and a PhD, working on the side until he became senior geologist in Tallahassee for the Prairie Oil Division of Sinclair Prairie Oil Co. Later Jim was with Atlantic Richfield as chief geologist; he was busy with new drilling projects and extensive travel through Mississippi, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Alaska from 1943-73. From 1972-1988, he was North Sea exploration manager of Arco Intl. in London. Upon retirement, he became an independent geological consultant for several years. His hobbies were growing roses and collecting glass bottles.

Then some facts and Jim and Deb, from her:

We met at Baylor College of Medicine when Jim was an Instructor and I was a [graduate] student. [AZ: Deb’s undergraduate degree was from Northwestern; after Baylor, she went on to a career as an audiologist.] We married in 1981 and moved to Colorado in 1983 [living in Evergreen and then Centennial, before retiring to Hawaii]. In those Colorado years, Jim worked in scientific programming in a variety of fields for a variety of companies. I can only provide general information about some of these distant-past projects.

Jim’s career path is a familiar one to me; it’s a path many of my friends and former students have followed. If you do an advanced academic degree in a scientific research field, even plus some post-docs, it won’t be easy to find a permanent academic position, running a lab and getting grant support. But your academic research will have required you to become an expert in computer programming for it. And so prepared you for a rewarding career in systems programming. Which is what happened to Jim: biology at Princeton, physiology at Baylor, so scientific programming in Colorado. Of course it’s important in all of this that Jim was very good at what he did.

Finally a photo. This posting is a death notice, yes, but it’s also a tribute to my friend, and a celebration of his life. So now we get to a photo, and some fun.

For some time Jim posted to Facebook about his travels with Deb. Great adventures to all sorts of places. There are some photos on Jim’s Facebook page — one is the banner header there; another is a lovely inset, which I offer to you here (cropped to focus on Deb and Jim):

The photo is dated 8/11/16, but where were they? I asked Deb, and got this wonderful reply:

The 8/16 photo was taken at the Santa Fe Opera House. Many summers we traveled to Santa Fe to attend an opera in that spectacular outdoor venue. In 2016, we attended the production of Gounod’s Romeo et Juliette. Our last trip there was in 2022 to see the world premiere of Huang Ruo’s M. Butterfly. Some of my happiest memories are of the adventures we encountered attending the opera on our travels. Some productions were terrible, some were exquisite, but all were memorable.

This is the way we should remember Jim: traveling with Deb to delightful places, including to Santa Fe for the opera.

A note of thanks. To Deb, of course, who’s been unfailingly helpful in this time of great pain. My heart goes out to her; she has lost the lynchpin of her life.

And then to Benita Bendon Campbell, the only person from the friendship network surrounding Jim and me in Princeton so long ago who has survived (and who had revived this friendship on Facebook): thanks for ransacking her memory for a number of the details I’ve reported here.

 

This entry was posted on October 23, 2024 at 4:06 pm and is filed under Academic life, Biology, Death notices, My life, Personal life, Princeton, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.